Talent acquisition that works

DB Group wants to improve its profile as an attractive employer and win new employees.

Employer attractiveness(rank in Germany)

2017

2016

Change

2015

absolute

%

DB Group

13

16

+3

–

20

High school students

15

26

+11

–

29

Students/graduates

20

24

+4

–

22

Skilled workers

13

12

–1

–

16

Academically experienced

professionals

10

9

–1

–

17

In the year under review, we were able to improve our employer ranking once again and exceeded our target for 2017 of rank 16.

Since April 2017, we have been active on the market with our new employer branding campaign. With our new campaign slogan “Welcome, you are one of us.” we issue an invitation to all potential applicants, who, similar to us, work on themselves and their goals and want to improve DB Group. The new slogan replaces the pre­­­vious “A job like no other.” In the new campaign, we con­­­tinue using our candidate-focused, digital and innovative approach. We use authentic and modern storytelling to give the DB employer brand a human face. While the new campaign continues on the path of our 360-degree approach and keeps achieving maximum branding effects, the new employer branding has an even stronger digital focus. The new employer image is strongly linked with the transformational goals of Railway of the Future and stands for a new, modern and open DB Group.

During this year our focus was particularly on our “bottleneck professions” in the structurally strong regions. After launching the new employer campaign, we were active with ten recruiting campaigns for our various target groups, particularly in these regions. Furthermore, we intensively focused on the target groups of engineers and IT professionals. In the fall, we carried out additional marketing and recruiting measures, once more searching for qualified, skilled employees and those transitioning from other fields. As part of these measures, we conducted “Germany’s biggest job interview”. Here we held simultaneously intensive interviews at seven locations on seven days. In addition, we were present at select train stations with booths where interested potential employees could attend spontaneous informative talks regarding a professional career at DB Group.

In May 2017, we received the Employer Branding Award from the European research institute trendence in the category “Best Employer Branding for High School Students.” Furthermore, we received the German HR Award (Deutscher Personalwirtschaftspreis) from the HR journal “Personalwirtschaft” for our new employer branding campaign.

In the previous year, Avature had been selected as the new recruiting software in an EU-wide tendering process. The software was rolled out in Australia as the pilot country in July 2017. In October 2017 there followed the rollout in North America for DB Schenker. As a further pilot, a rollout was prepared for DB Cargo in Spain. By selecting these pilot countries, we took different DB companies as well as locations on three different continents into account. Preparations for a general rollout of Avature in Germany started at the end of 2017.

The recruitment focus is on creating a unique and modern applicant experience. For this, we intend to use a candidate-focused process and innovative tools such as virtual reality and chatbots.

Demographic preparedness as of Dec 31

2017

2016

2015

Percentage of staffing needs coveredin Germany (%)

97.1

97.3

97.3

Germany (companies accounting for about 84% of domestic employees).

The percentage of staffing needs covered remained almost the same in the year under review.